Cinema from Spain is the Protagonist of FICCI 58

Challenging, innovative and defiant productions, with aesthetics that question received legacies, and transgressive regarding their themes, characters, and narratives, arrive to the International Film Festival of Cartagena. Spanish Cinema 2007-2017: The Other Gaze, and Midnight Spanish Cinema: The Seedy, the Rakish and the Radical, are two programs made possible thanks to the support of the Foco Cultura Spain-Colombia 2018-2019, and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

Spanish Cinema 2007-2017: The Other Gaze

Spanish Cinema 2007-2017: The Other Gaze, is a program of 21 films taken from the last decade of filmmaking in this country. Contemporary Spanish film production, essentially diverse and unclassifiable, has taken in dissident and strongly authorial voices. Spanish filmmaking did not die out with the economic recession, but rather found its place, and maybe its time. In the words of the invited curator for this showcase, Chiara Marañón, “the Spanish films here gathered fluctuate and move between the periphery and the center, the rupture and the inheritance, the secession and the succession.”

The Spanish films gathered for this program are also part of the resistance because they eschew the identitarian and essentialist representation. These films, following the coordinates set down by the invited curator, talk about either (1) the self: Ensayo final para utopía, Los materiales, Familystrip; (2) us: Le Jour et la Nuit, Gente en sitios; (3) the exterior: 025 Sunset Red, Todos Vós Sodes Capitáns; (4) the interior: La soledad, Buenos días resistencia, Misterio; (5) the past: Plus Ultra, Expo Lío 92;’ (6) the future: Sueñan los androides; (7) the general: Montaña en sombra; (8) the particular: El jurado.

Midnight Cinema

Midnight Cinema will have four Spanish productions, all of them transgressive both in the themes and characters they focus on, as in the formal and narrative decisions they take. Their innovation lies, paradoxically, in what is most ingrained in many Spanish traditions: an original and recognizable way of facing the dark side of life, by celebrating and conjuring it through art. This late night space for groundbreaking films that challenge acquired notions of good taste and normality comes back with defiant and indecent Spanish films.These films are: Vampyros Lesbos (1971) by Jesús Franco, one of the most famous films of one of the most prolific European directors of exploitation films; Rapture (1979), a cult film by Iván Zuleta, who only made two feature-films; Dance with the Devil (1997) by Alex de la Iglesia, a film with a long and well-known commercial trajectory; and one true rarity, the avant-garde documentary Cada ver es (1981) by Ángel García del Val. Four films that confront the monstrous and abnormal only to discover how the human also lives there.

More activities of the Foco Cultura Spain-Colombia in FICCI 58

During FICCI 58, we will also have the exhibition Still Shooting: Spanish and Colombian Filmmakers, by the photographer Óscar Fernández Orengo, made up of fifty photographs taken in the last seventeen years, mainly portraits of Colombian and Spanish filmmakers, that show the special bond between artists on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first meeting place will be the Centro de Formación de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID) in Cartagena, between March 1 and April. Later they will meet in cities like Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali.